untitled
by roysenal
Summary: "He's dead," Dick whimpers out again, and a whole new wave of ragged sobs convulses through him and he shouts, "JASON'S DEAD."


**Disclaimer: I do not own Young Justice**

**Author's Note: I officially give up on all titles.**

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"Jason's dead."

Those are the first words that come out of Dick's mouth when Artemis and Wally open the door to their apartment. His voice cracks when he chokes them out; he's soaked head to toe, from his skin to his bones.

Artemis and Wally are shocked, frozen, but Wally snaps out of it; he grabs Dick's arm and pulls him into their home. Artemis shuts the door; she feels numb, she doesn't know what to think.

Dick collapses as he stumbles but Wally catches him, and leads him over to the coach. Dick falls backwards and slams his head on the wall. There is no pain felt there.

"He's_ dead,"_ Dick whimpers out again, and a whole new wave of ragged sobs convulses through him and he shouts, _"JASON'S DEAD_."

The words finally hit Artemis like a ton of bricks, breaking through the numbness and opening her heart wide to the pain - a pain that is so terrible she doesn't known if it will ever heal; which means what Dick is feeling could only be, at the very least, a thousand times worse.

Wally's next to Dick on the couch, rubbing circles on his back, attempting to be comforting when he knows that nothing can. He turns towards Artemis, the look on his face and Dick sobbing endlessly next to him breaks her even more. She knows Wally feels the same thing she is. They've never lost a teammate before; Dick's lost too many.

Artemis realizes she's still standing by the front door. She swallows a hard lump in her throat and rushes to the kitchen. She braces herself against the sink to stop herself from shaking, she feels her dinner returning. She rinses her hands in cold water and splashes her face.

Jason's dead.

Artemis quickly grabs a glass of cold water for him and sets it down on the coffee table before sitting on the other side of Dick. Dick's hysterical; Artemis wonders if he will forever more be that way. One person can only lose so much.

Artemis tries to take Dick's hand, but Dick moves them so that they are across his chest, digging into his shirt like he's holding himself - like he's trying to hold his heart in. Artemis then puts her arms around and his shoulders and grasps tightly. She places a soft, slow kiss on his temple; she fits her face into the crick of his neck.

Outside, the rain continues on and increasingly gets harder. Artemis can hear a dog bark in the distance, the splash the water as a car drives on by, a horn honking.

_"HE'S DEAD!"_ Dick yells as thunder booms gravely in the distance. Artemis flinches.

Dick trashes against Artemis' grip and Wally puts his arms around Dick's shoulders too, so that he is wrapped around Dick and even Artemis too.

Artemis tilts her head; she can just barely see Wally's face under Dick's quivering chin. He has tears in his eyes; Artemis can just make them out through her own.

_Jason's dead._

She stifles back a sob; Wally does too. Dick's weeping slows down for a second as he gasps for air, but it returns harder than ever as lightning strikes the sky.

She wonders what Bruce – Barbara – is doing now, - terrible, horrible, consumed by grief. She wonders why Dick is here at Palo Alto and not in Gotham city.  
She wonders how Jason…

The three sit in their embrace for hours, holding each other, holding Dick. Eventually, Artemis has slipped down so that she's snuggled into Dick's chest with her arms around his waist.

Artemis looks up at Dick. She sees a choked-up Dick of fifteen, telling her his family story after all that time. She sees Robin at fourteen in a white and red mask with a far off look in his eyes, holding a sadness she could never have imagined. She sees a young boy of only thirteen floating, suspended, unconscious, in a case of water before crashing down onto the hard, concrete floor. She sees him de-aging until he's nine years old in a red, yellow, and black circus outfit - just like the one in the tear-stained family photo he had shown her - with a shattered look and sobs matching the magnitude of the ones he was racking now.

The words - those five simple _words_ - that he had said to her that changed her life and gave her hope, that made her believe in herself and that she carried with her wherever she went, echoed through her head. She doesn't hear them in the same, frustrated tone as that they had been said in, but in Dick's broken wails of the present.

Artemis' world feels like its stop turning. That although the clock continues to tick on by, she and Wally and Dick - and whoever knew or carried for Jason - were trapped in a state of timeless, endless mourning.

It's a wonder that Dick still has any tears left, that his throat isn't dry and cracked and bleeding from a pain, that his screams and yells and shouts don't ever decrease in volume. Artemis knows that it's not her world that has stopped turning, but Dick's and Dick's only. He was traveling backwards through all his suffering and all his loss that was too great for one person to bear; she and Wally were sucked into his gravitational pull and that nothing would ever be right in the world even again unless Dick was.

_"HE'S DEAD!" _Dick screams through his sobs,_ "HE'S DEAD HE'S DEAD! HE'S GONE – HE'S DEAD! JASON'S GONE JASON'S GONE!"_

But she doubted that Dick's world would turn forward and on once again; she was surprised it had been going all these years.

_"JASON-!"_

Artemis wonders if Dick will ever be traught again.

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**Sometimes I cry myself to sleep over Dick Grayson.**

_**~ roysenal**_


End file.
